


Make me a picture of the sun

by middlemarch



Series: Daffodil Universe [2]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Drawing, F/M, Romance, Slow Burn, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 18:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6482881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a lull in the hospital's frantic pace, everyone turns to their own devices. Jed is interrupted while working on a medical treatise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make me a picture of the sun

**Author's Note:**

> So, I tried to lighten up the angst on this one and also give all the characters a mini-break (a la Bridget Jones, perhaps).

For a few weeks, the hospital entered into a kind of lull. There were soldiers to tend to, but they either healed up slowly or died fast, without any great fanfare. Mary and Samuel had finally wrestled the tall windows open in the front of the house, so the air was able to move through, cleansing the miasma of iron and bile that clung to the corners of the room, the bed linens, even the nuns’ trailing habits. The patients were quieter, more content to amuse themselves with cards or premature nostalgia for the battles just past, but it meant fewer demands, fewer cries in the night. Everyone began to sleep better.

After a few days during which the nurses continued to scurry, without cause, and the doctors to pace their rounds most briskly, to find themselves at the last bed and the forenoon yawning ahead, not a limb to trim on the docket, the staff began to attend to other things. Dr. Summers ostensibly settled at his great walnut desk to finalize paperwork, though most suspected he was making the final inroads on his favorite bourbon. His snores tended to confirm the latter. Matron Brannan undertook a great overhaul of the house, including an inventory, which allowed her to while away whole afternoons in the cool shadows, nursing a cup of chicory which she swore was better than coffee. Hale and Hastings were hardly to be seen but all others avoided the hallway where they two might be espied, unwilling to risk a confrontation or the revelation of Nurse Hastings’s underthings. Chaplain Hopkins played chess against an unseen opponent, rehearsing sermons he would not give and toying with dreams of a blue-eyed bride he’d not wed. What Samuel and Aurelia were about, Jed didn’t inquire. It seemed fair that as a freeman and freewoman, they were entitled to their own devices. He did miss Aurelia singing in the yard, her husky contralto reminding him of home, or the perception he’d had of happiness there as a boy.

Jed was engaged in scholarly pursuits, liberally interspersed with Virginia tobacco. He wrote up case reports and was working on getting down the steps of a new procedure he’d developed with Samuel Diggs’s help, after several boys had lost their hands the standard way. The surgery protocol required smoke rings and pacing about the room. Jed looked up and out his window. It was a pale green afternoon with the sunlight gilding every tree and shrub in the back garden. The fragrance of the flowers stole around him, driving away the urge to smoke, smoothing over the ever-present desire for the needle that lived in his nerves. That was dulled today, almost easy to ignore. He stood musing for a moment, when his reverie was broken by an exclamation from the veranda below, a very clear, very Yankee “Damn!” The diagrams and footnotes about the thenar muscles would have to wait; intrigue beckoned.

Jed walked down to the veranda, enjoying the air on his face, its little eddies serene. He saw Mary at the far end of the porch, sitting in a high-backed chair with something perched upon her lap. She’d dressed her hair differently it seemed; the mass of braids she usually wore was replaced by a snood, unexpectedly fashionable in violet. He made his way toward her, curious to see this Mary. He noticed her head was bent and she was intently focused on what he could now make out was a sketchbook. At her side was a small table with a neat pile of pencils and brushes, bundled in cloth like an oversized needle book. Her skirts were a drab backdrop for the ivory tablet of paper, her clever hands busy.

“Damn, damn, damn!” Jed blinked and then smiled. He had never imagined proper Mary would sit at her leisure and swear a blue streak. He saw a wrinkle on her forehead and noted her slightly pursed lips. He felt an icy electric thrill as she licked her lips, the tip of her tongue wetting first her prim pink upper lip, then dipping to her plump lower lip, reddened and, he realized, recently bitten. She closed her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh, ending with a little huff. Jed looked about and ascertained they were alone before sidling closer and making himself known.

“Baroness, it never occurred to me you would find relief in such a manner,” he teased, inclining his head to the sketchbook in her lap and showing, with a wry glance, he was alluding to her profanity. She surprised him again, concealing, but not soon enough, a pout. “What are you about, Mary?”

“I do a little sketching when I can,” she replied, trying to regain her coolly virtuous demeanor but stymied by the frustration furrowing her brow and curling her lip.

“To what end? I ask because it would seem it is not providing you with the tranquility you seek.”

“In general, the sketchbook is for me alone, a record of my thoughts, a way to capture that which would otherwise pass away, ephemera. But sometimes, like today, I try to draw something to share. I still correspond with my husband’s sister in Germany, and Anna likes to receive my drawings of life in America. She visited us but twice while we were married but we were fast friends and I would like to send her something from my time here. She asks so little, sends me most charming letters of her country life in Bavaria-- and she is so kind, she often sends back sweets, marzipan, that is, marchpane along with the letters. I have tried and tried today, but it won’t come right. I cannot get it right and I’m ready to--!” Her color was up and curls were barely contained in their iris net. She was actually trembling with temper. Jed was flabbergasted and frankly, delighted. This Mary, this petulant Mary, was one he would never have imagined and he could hardly stop the bubble of affectionate laughter in his throat. He had been married long enough, albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, to know he risked an outpouring of wrath comparable to Etna’s assault on Pompeii should the slightest chuckle escape.

“May I see? What are you trying to draw?” He asked, using a serious tone to convey his appreciation of her distress. He was containing his true amusement with his best effort.

“It is a drawing of the ward during rounds, with you and Dr. Hale visiting the boys. I have tried to place Nurse Hastings in the mix, but just as in real life, she refuses to obey me. I cannot get the expression right on Corporal Neville and Private Harris appears determined to defy me as well. You, at least, are somewhat like.” She peered down at the picture and he followed her gaze. He could hardly understand her dismay. She had gotten the scene nearly perfect, down to Hale’s pompous stance, Hastings’s pugnacious jaw thrust in counter-balance to her heavy bun and cap. Each soldier had his own true expression he recognized from recent days, enough to invoke them to him not by injury but Christian name, there Robert, there Edward. He looked more closely and saw the sketch was organized around him at center, every other person and object in symmetry beyond what there had been but which remained in his memory of rounds. She had caught his look, the impatient energy in his eyes, but had given him command and gravitas, one hand on a boy’s shoulder showing compassion. His eyes were thickly lashed and the arc of his bearded jaw showed her clear regular attention to his face. His amusement changed to the most curious sense of gratitude and affection. He felt the petulant perfectionism coming off her in crashing waves and was completely enamoured of her.

“Mary, dear Mary,” he slipped, “It is beautiful. You have caught us all in amber. I had no idea. There is no way your German sister will be anything less than delighted with this. Truly. You have taken our everyday and made it something fine, extraordinary. Mary,” he finished before he could say anything more, the everything more that beat within him.

He saw her smile then, a rare smile he had seen just a few times, soft and open. The smile he imagined he would see after a kiss or upon waking, her head on the pillow beside him. It was just enough and too much; even the yearning for the morphine was drowned by it.

“Are there others? That you would share?” He asked, curious but also hoping to stretch and settle the moment between them.

“If you will look…” She offered the book up to him. He turned the pages and saw Nurse Green, devout as she cared for a dying Confederate. There were the nuns, every face distinct and womanly within its coif. And then, there were his hands operating, each tendon delineated, the tension and intention clear, a portrait of what he often felt was the best part of himself. In one drawing, she had conveyed the inverse of the man his mother and Eliza decried and offset the failure he felt when the urge for the needle skittered along his spine. He looked into the mirror of her sketch and felt a sense of wholeness he realized had been missing so long he had nearly forgotten it; with its return, he felt the strength of his mind, the power to transform his cleverness into brilliance, compassion into love. 

“They are not so much, I think. I had only a few lessons as a girl and I spent most of my time drawing dress patterns, designs for calico prints…” Jed could hardly believe her. She spoke without artifice, truly convinced of her words, of the deficits only she perceived. There were many things he wanted to do and say, but he tried to choose the only words he knew to fit.

“Mary, these are exceptional, you are—these drawings are, how shall I say it? They are not about too little or too much, they are complete the way a circle is, the details are each just the right one to symbolize the whole of what is here, at Mansion House, and I think, what you make of it all in that stubborn mind of yours while you are working the whole time. A friend in Paris told me an artist is never satisfied, but to me, that is, I cannot imagine anything better than this, your gift.” He stopped, sensing he was floundering, his attempt to find just the right words unraveling. He took a long breath and looked at her again. Mary was smiling at him, mostly with those big dark eyes, and she reached out to put a hand on his forearm where he’d rolled up the sleeve. Her hand ignition, but of a fire he could not yet approach.

“I thank you, Jedediah, for your kind words and I sincerely apologize for my unladylike language earlier. Sometimes it is very hard to be a woman, a proper woman, and these days have been a strange surcease. I will set the book aside now and perhaps we may find some tea, if Matron hasn’t inventoried it all to Timbuktu, and you can tell me of your case report. I think you meant to write up Major Browning’s ear?” She led him down the veranda, back toward the house, her hoopless skirts still swinging like a bell, the ribbon of her snood pert atop her head. Sometimes, Jed thought, it is very hard to be a man, a proper man, but he let her lead him to the teapot and the harbor of work.


End file.
